Who is Who in the Emerging Field of Spintronics (Spin-based Electronics)?

        Here is a list of leading scientists in the spintronics field.

Albert Fert: Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. He is currently professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay and scientific director of a joint laboratory ('Unité mixte de recherche') between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific Research Centre) and Thales Group. Also, he is an Adjunct professor of physics at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.

Peter Grünberg: Peter Grünberg is a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his coincidental discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.

Jack Bass: Jack Bass is a professor of Physics at Michigan State University. His research interests include Point defects in metals, magnetotransport in metals, thermopowers of metals, electronic transport in metals, ultra-high precision electronic transport measurements on "simple" metals, finite size effects in metallic spin glasses, and giant magnetoresistance in metallic magnetic multilayers.

William H. Butler: William H. Butler is a professor of physics and the Director of MINT Center (Center for Materials for Information Technology) at the University of Alabama. He also serves as the Director of the NSF-Sponsored MRSEC (Materials Research Science and Engineering Center).  He has received DOE Awards for Outstanding Scientific Achievement and for Outstanding Sustained Research. He was the first recipient of the National Institute of Materials Science Award for Breakthroughs in Materials Science. He has authored more than 150 scholarly papers and is co-author of one book. Bulter's research interest includes physics of magnetic materials, spin-dependent transport in magnetic multilayers and nanostructures, electronic structure of magnetic oxides and chalcogenides, domain wall switched graded media, electronic structure of half-metals, and precessional damping in magnetic materials.

Chia-Ling Chien: Chia-Ling Chien is a professor of physics at The Johns Hopkins University. He has more than 300 publications in refereed journals and holds several patents. He is the 469th. most cited (1981-1997) in physics, astrophysics, materials science, chemical physics, and related fields. Chien's current research interest includes fabrication of nanostructured materials and the studies of their structural, electronic, magnetic, and superconducting properties; highly spin polarized materials, spin-transfer torque effects, and magnetoelectronics.

William J. Gallagher: Gallagher is a Research Staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a senior manager of Magnetoelectronics at IBM. He has been leading an effort to explore the use of magnetic tunnel junctions for nonvolatile RAM at IBM. Gallagher has over 150 publications in the areas of thin film magnetics, superconductivity, and superconducting devices and physics, and holds 12 U.S. patents and several pending patents.

Arunava Gupta:

James S. Harris: Harris specializes in semiconducting heterostructures -- especially those, such as gallium arsenide, used in lasers central to all fiberoptic communications networks and in all digital cellular telephones. His current research interests are in the physics and application of new artificially structured materials and nanofabrication techniques for new electronic and optoelectronic devices and quantum computing.

Bret Heinrich: Heinrich is a professor of Physics at Simon Fraser University. His research interests include molecular beam epitaxy, surface science and high temperature superconductivity.

Mark Johnson: Mark Johnson is a research physicist at Naval Research Laboratory. His research focuses on the electrical transport of spin polarized electrons in novel systems, which involves the invention and development of nanometer scale device structures that incorporate a ferromagnetic element, and is a cornerstone of spintronics field. He made early contributions to the development of MRAM. He discovered a novel technique for creating and measuring nonequilibrium spin magnetization in a class of high mobility semiconductor structures know as asymmetric quantum wells. He is currently working on fabrication of novel device structures with dimensions of 100nm and less.

Berend T. Jonker: Berend T. Jonker is a research physicist at Naval Research Laboratory. His research focuses on magnetic order in two-dimensional metal single crystal films. He was one of the first conclude that reduced dimensionality resulted in a dominant perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and an out-of-plane magnetization, factors important in the design of nanoscale magnetic devices such as nonvolatile memory. His current research involves electrical injection of spin-polarized carriers from magnetic contacts into a semiconductor using the spin-polarized light emitting diode as a test platform with an emphasis on interface physics.

Stephan von Molnar: Stephan von Molnar is a professor of Physics and director of Center for Materials Research and Technology at the Florida State University. Before joining the Florida State University, he was a research staff of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and held various management positions. His research focuses on rare earth metals and alloys, transition metal based diluted magnetic semiconductors, and the perovskite type HiTc and CMR compounds. He has made significant contributions to the development of a novel Hall gradiometer for their magnetic characterization. His work in nano-magnetic particles have been applied in such areas as storage technologies and magnetic sensing devices.

Jagadeesh Moodera: Jagadeesh Moodera is a senior research scientist at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. His research focuese on spin-polarized tunneling in superconductor junctions and ferromagnetic tunneling. In 1994, he discovered a practical way to implement room temperature MTJ using a magnetic stack based on CoFe-Al2O3-Co, which demonstrated a TMR ratio of 11.8%. 

Stuart S. Parkin: Parkin's research interests have included organic superconductors, high-temperature superconductors, and, most recently, magnetic thin film structures and spintronic materials and devices for advanced sensor, memory, and logic applications. Parkin is a pioneer in the science and application of spintronic materials. His discovery of oscillatory interlayer coupling in magnetic multilayers and giant magnetoresistance in sputter deposited magnetic metallic heterostructures in 1989 led to IBM's development of the spin-valve read head, which enabled a more than 100-fold increase in the magnetic hard-disk-drive data-density since 1998.

Daniel C. Ralph: Daniel Ralph is a professor of Physics at Cornell University. His research focuses on fabrication of nanometer-scale devices and the measurement of their electronic and magnetic properties at low temperatures. His research areas include: new nanofabrication techniques, high-speed dynamics in magnetic devices, transport through metal-nanoparticles, single-molecule, and carbon-nanotube quantum dots, magnetic and superconducting devices, quantum properties of defects and impurities.

Maxim Tsoi: Maxim Tsoi is an assistant professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on experimental investigations of spin-transfer-torque phenomena in magnetic nanostructures with emphases on ferromagnets, antiferromagnets, and antiferromagnetic GMR.

John Q. Xiao: John Q. Xiao is a professor of Physics at the University of Delaware. He is also the director of Center for Spintronics and Biodetection sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. His research focuses on spin polarized transport, high temperature soft magnetic materials, antificial band-gap materials, AFM/FM exchange bias system, nanocrystalline materials, and left-handed materials. 

Gang Xiao: Gang Xiao is a professor of Physics and engineering at Brown University. He is also the founder of Micro Magnetics, Inc. Xiao's research interest includes electron transport and magnetism in low dimensional systems such as metallic thin films, superlattices and nanoscale crystals; giant and colossal magnetoresistence effect in layered and oxide solids; spin-dependent magnetic tunneling effect; nanoscale devices and magnetoelectronics; physics of novel superconducting and magnetic nanostructures; high temperature superconductivity; high vacuum and laser ablation in thin film fabrication.

Peng Xiong: Peng Xiong is a professor of Physics at the Florida State University. His research interests include mesoscale physics, spintronics, and organic/solid-state hybrid structures.

Shoucheng Zhang: Zhang specializes in theoretical condensed matter physics focuses on the theory of quantum spin transport, dissipationless spin current, the spin Hall effect and  the theory of high Tc superconductivity based on the SO(5) symmetry between anti ferromagnetism and superconductivity.

Keywords: spintronics, magnetoelectronics, spin electronics, spin-based electronics, giant magnetoresistance, spin valves, magnetic tunneling junctions, tunneling magnetoresistance, colossal magnetoresistance, spin torque, momentum transfer, spin injection, magnetic semiconductor, spin coherence, spin Hall effect, anomalous Hall effect, magnetic transistor, spin transistor, spin polarization, magnetization, magnetic moment, magnetism, magnetic materials, MRAM, magnetic random access memory, universal memory, DRAM, spin logic.

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